Kindred Memory Rev. Ruth MacKenzie Delivered at Prairie Group 2018 Topic: Explore the meaning of memory and ancestry in Butler's Kindred. How might ​ our own deep re-examination of our ancestry and the memories/stories of our past, remembered, or reconstructed, help us minister more effectively in the present? “It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”1 –James Baldwin Memory For many of us, enculturated and shaped by Eurocentric frameworks, and “google brain,” the term memory connotes simply the ability to recall. Where did I leave my car keys? What ​ ​ were the key points of contention in the Western Unitarian Conference? What did that congregant say to me in our last meeting about their family history? Although brain science explains memory as a complex system of storage whereby groups of neurons are primed to fire together in the same area of the brain and the same patterns that created the original experience, in an organic dance of wonder, we often resort to the metaphor of a filing system or a database. Memory is reduced to accurate record keeping, and documentation of events retrieved when 1 James Baldwin, Quote from Giovanni's Room, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/814207. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 1 needed. Memory is individual. Memory is mechanistic, untrustworthy if it is not photographic, and utterly soulless. Memory as recall may serve a society ever propelled to move faster, get smaller, and ​ ​ more “convenient,” but it will not serve us in our racial justice journey, nor cure what ails us. So many facets of memory and its power are left on the cutting room floor in this iteration. The whole cloth of memory is more colorful, intricate, wild, patterned, nuanced, relational, and encompassing than recall. ​ ​ In the Griot traditions of West Africa, the griot artist is the living memory of the people. Traditionally, the griot were a caste of people dating from 13thC and charged with singing and storying history in the oral tradition. Often likened to a baobab tree, the griot absorbs the stories, the lineage, the histories of a people like water during the rainy season; and like the baobab, produces incredibly dense and nutritious fruit that feeds and nourishes, even when everything around is dried up and parched. Griots recite lineage and historical events with incredible accuracy and beauty, but they are also weavers into the future. As the beloved Senegalese film director, Djibril Diop Mambéty said: “the word griot (...) is the word for what I do and the role that the filmmaker has in society... the griot is a messenger of one’s time, a visionary and the creator of the future.”2 The griot is part artist, part healer, part historian, part minister, part storyteller, part messenger, all in service of a people’s memory, this place where past meets present and in so doing, feeds and envisions future. In ancient Greece, the great Goddess Mnemosyne, or Memory, was the keeper of life ​ ​ through remembrance. She had nine daughters who were called the Muses. Because their father 2 John James, “The Griots of West Africa – Much More Than Story-Tellers” ​ ​ ​ ​ Word of Mouth, Goethe Institut, 2012, http://www.goethe.de/ins/za/prj/wom/osm/en9606618.htm. ​ ​ 2 was Zeus, the one who discerns the truth, the Muses honored their lineage with truthful tellings. All artists, including myself, hope to be captured by that intangible thing, by the muse, in order to speak truthfully and compellingly about the human condition through our art form. Memory is more than a repository of dead things and ideas. Mnemosyne is a living stage, where the Muses perform the storied, sung, languaged memory of our lives, individually and collectively. The artist is the link between memory and meaning. In these two examples and in so many others, memory is more like relationship than recall. Memory is not only in the human brain, it is located in the human heart, a prompting beyond ourselves that evokes an inspired telling. This brings us to another place of memory and knowing, and this is the memory living in the body; our individual bodies, our generational bodies, in the body and flesh of the world. Memoria of the flesh is more than metaphysical hyperbole, or a spiritual conviction. New understandings in psychobiology reveal that our strongest emotions–our disgust, our sense of safety and wellbeing, our sense of danger, our sorrows, our hope–are not held in our cognitive brain but in a complex weaving of nerves throughout the body. This network connects to our brainstem (our lizard brain), our gut, our throat, our heart, our lungs and spine. It is called the vagus nerve or the wandering nerve. It does not use our cognitive capacity or reasoning to ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ navigate the world, but instead is the body’s memory organ negotiating between acting and ​ ​ resting at any given moment. ​ I’ve stood backstage numerous times throughout my career as a performing artist guzzling water because I’m so thirsty. It doesn’t matter how much I drink, my throat seems dry as I am about to make my entrance. Many performers, and singers will attest to this very same 3 experience. This is the vagus nerve, the body’s memory organ at work. To sing in front of a ​ ​ group of people whether it’s a group of fifty or a thousand, is an out of the ordinary event. My body perceives it as unsafe, and it responds. My heart beats a little faster. My throat constricts, and I’m thirsty. I’ve since learned that all of the water I’m downing is actually going to my major muscle groups, instead of my throat. My body is getting ready to run, to get as far away from this unnatural activity as possible. My cognitive brain may assure with all kinds of reasons and rhetoric about how this performance will go well, but in the folds of the curtains, I’m still incredibly thirsty. In his groundbreaking book entitled, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and ​ the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem calls the vagus nerve, the ​ soul nerve. “The body is where we live. It’s where we fear, hope, and react. It’s where we constrict and relax. And what the body most cares about are safety and survival. When something happens to the body that is too much, too fast, or too soon, it overwhelms the body and can create trauma….Trauma is not primarily an emotional response. Trauma always happens in the body. It is a spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage.”3 Menakem’s central focus is the body’s memory and its responses to the trauma inducing framework of “white-body supremacy.”4 He invites us to work with the memory of the flesh, with our soul nerve, in order to disrupt and erode this all–encompassing framework of 3 Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our ​ ​ Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2017) , 7. ​ ​ 4 Menakem uses the term white body supremacy to continue to emphasize that trauma inducing structures are ​ ​ ​ not simply understood in our cognitive awareness but in our bodies. 4 domination, hatred and violence that was embedded in this country’s DNA from the beginning so that we might grow up and heal. In her essay, “False memories, true memory and maybes,” writer, therapist Lynn Cowan quotes the 18th C rabbi, Baal Shem Tov: “In remembrance is the beginning of redemption.” She continues, “Redemption comes through being able to carry the past, however heavy the burden, because forgetting means to become uprooted, one-dimensional, flat, psychopathic. The capacity to feel deeply is in part dependent on the ability to remember images of deeply felt experience...images stored in that living psychic temple named Mnemosyne.”5 Memory is the hero’s journey, as James Baldwin so succinctly describes. Kindred Memory It is from this whole cloth of memory, that Octavia Butler sews her novel Kindred and ​ ​ invites us to take the hero’s journey. She will not let us avert our eyes from the heavy burden of ​ ​ our past, our nation’s soul memory, regardless of what color our skin may be. In the Critical Essay found at the end of Kindred, Robert Crossley tells the story of Butler coming to work with ​ ​ her mother as a housemaid, and observing the far reach of slavery into her present day as her ​ ​ mother entered through backdoors, was talked about while present, and basically treated like a non-person, something beneath notice.6 Butler also described a time in college when she heard an African American classmate express feelings of being held back by the older generation and wishing that they would just die off. She remembers thinking, he knows a lot about black history but “he’s not feeling this in his gut.”7 It was in the confluence of remembrance of her mother’s 5 Lynn Cowan, “False memories, true memory and maybes,” in Tracking the White Rabbit: a subversive ​ ​ view of modern culture (New York: Routledge, 2002), 57. ​ 6 Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with Octavia E.